The Well Read Viking

Thursday, November 6, 2014

This is not your traditional urban fantasy novel, nor is it your usual novel about coping with loss. Somehow it managed to combine the two into something that is fairly palatable.

Bulfinch starts out discussing the life of a young girl. She had been quite happy, but while her parents were out on a cruise they disappeared and were never found. From that point on Rosie is forced to live with her eccentric and scholarly uncle. She never truly accepts that her parents are gone so she lives her life as if they are one day just going to return. For seven years this goes on. She graduates from high school at an early age and quickly gets her undergrad and is in the beginning stages of her graduate program.

One cherished memory she had from her childhood was the time that a piece of mail was wrongfully sent to their address. They went searching for the proper owner, but they could not find him. Eventually the young Rosie gave in and opened the letter. It contained a page from a book and the story enthralled her. Back in her current day, Rosie was having some struggles and so she pulled out this letter and reread it and imagined it out in her mind. The world went a bit odd for a moment and when she gathered herself she noticed that she was not alone. A knight was standing before her, yelling in some foreign tongue.

This book had a lot of things going for it. It was unique, it had a lot of heart and the prose was just delightful. It was one of those books that is a treat for the mind in the way it is written out. The part that detracted from the book for me was just how awful this woman was to her uncle. She had a lot of anger and hatred for a man who had done nothing to deserve it. It just seemed far too vitriolic for the character. The relationship does get better, but it never gets to the place where it should be.